The Connection Between Football Betting and eSports

Association football is the most popular sport on the planet. Nearly 150 years ago, the first professional football league was created in England, consisting of twelve teams, some of which are still in the top flight today.

Football predates gambling laws by almost a century, and it wasn’t until 1960 when a relaxation of the gambling legislation that was in place resulted in multiple betting companies and betting shops springing up across the UK. 

As football is the most popular sport in the UK by quite some distance, the most substantial betting markets were for professional games. Although sports like horse racing have a robust and core audience, with many ardent gamblers spending more money betting on horses than on football, overall, the football market was the most lucrative, and it continues to be the case today.

The Meteoric Rise Of Football & eSports

Football has created a solid and passionate market within England and across many countries in Europe and South America. These fanbases have been established over a century, passed down through generations, and are usually an extension of the town or city in which they reside. Although the popularity of eSports pails in comparison to football, there are similarities in the speed at which it has gained such popularity. In a little over a decade, eSports has gone from a promising industry to a multi-faceted, multi-billion dollar market with a truly global audience, and this is the sort of rise that football experienced back in the late 1800s.

The Variables Fuelling Both Markets

Regardless of the professional sport you enjoy, the strength of the gambling market related to that specific sport is usually a better, broader indicator of how popular it is. Professional video gaming (eSports) is no different from football in this regard. As there are dozens of tournaments worldwide with multi-million dollar prizes, tickets to watch the games unfold live sell out quickly and have taken place in multiple international arenas with millions of people watching online. The internet doesn’t just help stream these mammoth tournaments worldwide, but it also provides people with resources to read up on their favorite football and eSports markets so that they can better understand them.

For example, if you look at eSports news at Thunderpick regarding tournaments, you can better measure the top teams involved and the sort of news that can push eSports betting markets up or down. Football betting works in the same way, and although there might be an “embarrassment of riches” when it comes to high-quality blog content on your favorite sport, be it football or eSports, these detailed breakdowns and analyses can help form a more effective betting strategy than just mindlessly choosing your bet with no prior research. 

Football eSports Tournaments

While both betting markets benefit from the wealth of knowledge and information online, there is also a more direct link between the two topics. Although the most prominent eSports leagues tend to be in online battle arena video games, which are purposely designed for eSports tournaments due to the multiplayer nature of the free-roaming worlds, many professional sports have video games, such as Madden and NBA 2K. Still, FIFA has shown to be the most popular eSports league for virtual professional sports games, especially in Europe, where the popularity of the annual football game is staggering.

On the whole, eSports has revolutionized the way people play games. The fact they have provided a reputable avenue for people to turn video gaming into a full-time job is such a revolutionary aspect of eSports that it’s hard to fathom for those people of an older generation who didn’t grow up playing video games. Some eSports teams have been subject to Netflix documentaries and exposed to a vast global audience as eSports crosses into mainstream adoption, with the top players making millions of dollars annually. 

Conclusion

As you can see from our article today, the connections between football betting and eSports run a lot deeper than some people may initially think. Although football betting has been around for decades, the internet injected a new lease of life into it and provided a whole new dimension. Hundreds of new markets that wouldn’t have been able to exist in land-based bookmakers, such as in-play betting, are now a possibility thanks to the internet. 

The World Cup Final in 2018 was the most betted football game of all time, and it’s possible that this figure was surpassed in the 2022 Final, but official figures haven’t been released as of yet. Likewise, eSports is a market with nowhere near the same following without the internet. It has enabled a blueprint for professional video gamers to showcase their skills to a global audience, whether via a streaming service like Twitch or through televised tournaments.